I don’t remember the first time I wrote my name. What I do remember is the first time someone else was called my name. I told him that was my name too, but he couldn’t believe it. He was a fat boy with a puffy face. He looked like a little boxer.

Yellow of a sunflower yellow of acid yellow piled on yellow of the yellowbacked book they arrested Oscar Wilde for carrying yellow in curdles glowing from inside and gushing onto everything around. Yellow of burnished gold. The very same yellow.

My wife looked so much brighter and more alive with her eyes open and looking back at me. I held onto her feet with my hands and she pushed her toes against them. She must have been smiling under that oxygen mask, but I didn’t know what to say to her, and she couldn’t talk again yet.

I whistled bird sounds, but she didn’t open her eyes up or put a pillow over her ears or turn her face away or roll over away from the light. My wife hadn’t shifted her body since she had been in that hospital bed.

They had most of her body covered up with sheets and blankets and she seemed to be too small to be my wife. Her head was propped up with a pillow and they had laid her hair out on it, but her hair looked too thin and too gray to be my wife’s hair.

We walked for over an hour, and a lot of it I was quiet, thinking how can I ever be happy again? At the house, where our hosts spoke to us in Italian, our room was cool and dark, the windows shut, only slits of light from the spaces in the closed wooden shutters.